Tuesday, October 26, 2010

I said she said

I'm in that fever-dash at work prior to being out Thursday and Friday for World Fantasy Con, so forgive the recent silence. But there are many things going on, so here are a couple:

Over at Tor.com, I've got a guest post about cyberpunk and steampunk. Or something. I'm sure I'm brilliant.

And Madhatter reviews The Horns of Ruin. I usually don't point to reviews because you get into dangerous self-editing, where you point to positive reviews and ignore negatives. This happens to be a fairly positive review, but it brings up something that's been bumping around in my head that I wanted to talk about.

For both Heart of Veridon and The Horns of Ruin, I get tagged for having flat secondary characters. This troubles me, simply because it's a bad thing, and I try to address bad things.

First off, I don't dispute it. I think a lot of it comes from the fact that I wrote both of these books in the first person, which was a new style for me when I wrote HoV, and so all the tools I had learned to get inside a character's motivation could no longer be applied to anyone other than Jacob. There were so many other things I was grappling with stylistically in that book, that I never really got around to developing new tools.

And I think the same thing dogged me in Horns. I won't get into the decision making process about PoV and which characters to follow, but I was hoping to be able to correct a lot of that "flatness" in this one. So that's something I'm still working on, I guess, but that's the nature of writing.